Glocal City Situations

Before disciplines of architecture, architectural history, landscape architecture and urban and environmental planning tackle the “inconvenient truths” of global urbanization, climate change, social equity, cultural diversity and memory, we have to learn how to engage the complex form and shape of the local/global city, or glocal city --- networked communities that operate culturally and ecologically simultaneously in both local and global realms.

The term glocal city reflects the new reality that our cities operate simultaneously in parallel local and glocal daily realities. The biggest change is in a city's daily life, or meso-scale of urban living - a hybrid glocal urban landscape.

The drawing (see main page) depicts a set of historic events and changing disciplinary agendas that are reshaping educational studies and recalibrating our professions in response to the dual reality and opportunities embedded in glocal city thinking.

For example, in 1989, citizens armed with digital camers sent images around the world as they tore down the Berlin Wall or iron curtain that had split the globe into two superpower worlds. Its fall made vivid the urbanization vectors of advanced technological global digital PC networks accelerating nations and citizens into a world of virtual and terrestrial open borders. Meanwhile, scientific and design advances in ecological and networking protocols are reshaping the basic building roots of the four professions of architecture, architectural history, landscape architecture and urban and environmental planning.

The term glocal city is a narrative scaffold and design framework used to describe the present-day working context within which the four disciplines now operate.

In response, the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia and its four constituent graduate programs have implemented a number of research, educational and professional initiatives to integrate combined intellectual capital while enriching individual disciplinary foundations. This creative soft power of inter-disciplinary thinking has expanded professional work and research possibilities. Most importantly it reflects the School of Architecture’s mission to create productive and creative leaders or agents in a network of collaborating disciplines involved in setting the terms and making the spaces for a tolerant and cosmopolitan glocal city.

The glocal city is a method of intra-disciplinary thinking and working that will provide a common ground from which to construct interpersonal networks and information resource platform to support future graduate study and professional work.

This course sets the stage and helps give voice to the School of Architecture’s integrated graduate studies at the School. It is structured to introduce a way of thinking, conversing and sharing ideas and information across disciplinary lines. It uses a city case study and the presentation of faculty research and projects to illustrate various design setting terms and processes such that we can collectively utilize our skills, and creative energy to visualize and create with citizens those public things to translate information into civic narratives and a network of urban spaces for an emerging global cosmopolitan community audience.

Class Structure:

The course is structured into three parts. Each part will contain course material to be presented in lectures, discussed in section and explored in a semester long project incrementally producing a glocal city matrix -- composed of individual common course cards.

Part One: 4-Disciplines respond to Global-Local Urban Situations

In this part we will address the working premises of the glocal city as described by various different disciplinary authors, and lecturers. This is an individual project. Each student is responsible for developing two cards per week, based on lecture and readings material for review in discussion section. Each student will be responsible for developing a total of 8 cards. The final product will be due on Septembter 29th in the discussion section.

In this part, I will present in reading and lectures four design setting terms that I have developed through research and practice, that frame the formal, functional, productive and generative aspects of the glocal city. The four terms are inaugural terrain, second nature, mezzo connections, and generative additions.
We look at the urban morphology and present day urban situations of the cities of New Orleans and Los Angeles. These two cities reveal clearly many urban questions that other American cities face today and will have to address tomorrow. One of the primary links between these two city case studies is the issue of water. Historically they are linked by the railroad, and social and cultural connections east and west, and as international border cities.This will be a team project. Each section will break into 4 working goups - who will divide up the work of reviewing the material for the two cities. Each group will develop two examples for each of the four design terms, for a total of 8 cards per working group.This project is due on October 27th in discussion section.

Part Three: American Glocal City Cards

In the last part of the course, we build upon the work completed in Part 1 and 2 by enriching and adding detail to the terms. Each section will produce a deck of cards, of 56. Each section working group will be responsible for 13 cards plus a joker or title card for a total of 14. Each working goup will merge their work to form the section's collective deck of cards. When completed, the cards will form a matrix displaying in words and images the issues and ideas that are critical to shaping the future of American cities. The audience is the public. It is a national election year. The overriding question is, -- how can the four disciplines, help the next President and citizens enrich our cities to meet today's glocal demands?This project is a group project due on December 3rd.

Lectures will be held on Wednesdays and Fridays in room 158, please be ready to start at 9:00 am. I will give a series of lectures setting primary glocal city themes and concepts as well as background case study material on urban situations in New Orleans and Los Angeles. These lectures will be enriched and expanded upon with guest lectures by faculty from the four School programs of planning, architectural history, architecture and landscape architecture. They will present their differing insights on course themes through the presentation of their design projects and/or research. Each lecture will be enriched with required readings, skimming publications and exploring selected websites that are listed in the class website.

Discussion
sections will be held on Monday mornings in classrooms to be arranged. The discussion section is required and should be used to discuss lecture and reading material. It is the primary work base from that collectively you will discuss, share and produce material for the various parts of the semester project. The Part III portion of the semester project is a discussion section team effort.

Semester Project: Common Course Cards

Throughout the semester you are asked to produce individually weekly memorandums, in response to section discussions, lectures and readings. Each memorandum is an incremental construction of an individual and group information system from which you and others in your section will pull information to complete the requirements for the three different submission packages. It is critical that you complete individual weekly assignments and follow the required design format for all memorandums, which are to be presented in the form of what we call common course cards.

The common course card format is derived from two publications that can be found on Fine Arts reserve under SARC 600. They are, Civilizing Terrains, William R. Morrish and Delta Primer, Jane Wolff.

Learning to make cards a useful method of capturing and recording ideas, visually, and textually rich information into bit size or identifiable, facts, questions, insights or speculations.

Each card is a written and visual presentation of one thought. Each card can be a different perspective of a similar issue, or a broad range exploration. Each card has two views, one side contains written comments, or and the other side is a visual interpretation of those written comments. The visual material can be an image with overlaid written commentary, or hand drawn diagram, or digital graphic. The paragraph and image should be accompanied by a title that is states the issue represented on the card.

Over time as you accumulate cards composed from a common graphic format produces a vehicle to move your cards into a range of combinations of collected facts, questions, insights and speculations into narratives individually and collectively. Playing with the common course cards in multiple iterations reveals gaps in the information and patterns of opportunity.

It provides a common graphic foundation to from which to share disciplinary difference and similarities. It is a useful mechanism for organizing digital information files, project programs and research outlines.

More information regarding the common course cards can be found on the class website.